Thursday, October 25,2007 @ 3:55pm
Safari dusts IE, Firefox in performance
Safari is the king of speed according to a study performed by Michael Czeiszperger, general manager of Web Performance. Czeiszperger tested the Windows versions of Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Mozilla's Firefox 2, concluding "In all cases, the Safari 3 Windows beta was the fastest browser in terms of page load time," according to a Macworld UK report. The tests were performed by browsing the 16 most-trafficked sites as listed by Alexa. Interestingly, the performance differences between Safari and IE, and Safari and Firefox, were minimal when the site was pulled from the local cache, not the actual server. " When pulling a page from a remote server, however, Safari was on average 1.1 seconds faster than IE 7, and 1.4 seconds faster than Firefox.
When Apple first released Safari for Windows, it claimed "Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. And it executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2."
Apple's performance claims for its Safari browser were subsequently challenged by various reports. Apple's CEO told WWDC attendees during his keynote that the new browser was faster than its Internet Explorer and Firefox components; however, some tests performed showed that "Safari is slower than both IE 7 and Firefox in the login page and message index tests, in both cases by a substantial margin. Only when loading Google Calendar does Safari have a slight edge, clocking in at 12.8 seconds to IE's 17 seconds. But even there, Firefox has both the other browsers beat."